CREATION REVELATION AND PHILOSOPHY

Overview

by Johan P. A. Mekkes, translated from Dutch by Chris van Haeften

Standing in the tradition of Herman Dooyeweerd's philosophy of the cosmosnomic idea, Mekkes, guided by the method of transcendental critique and rooted in the reality of the cross, ventures into discussions with Heidegger, Sartre, and Jaspers.

ISBN: 978-0-932914-83-5
2010, paperback, 104 pages, $11.00

From the back cover

A committed Christian and deeply intellectual man, Johan Peter Albertus Mekkes was a captain in the Dutch army and special professor of reformational philosophy at the Universities of Leiden and Rotterdam.

Mekkes began his professional career in the Dutch army in 1915, becoming an officer in 1920. From 1942 to 1945 he was imprisoned by the Germans in the Stanislau POW camp where he met Hans Rookmaaker and introduced him to the reformational philosophy of Herman Dooyeweerd. Mekkes himself had initiated an academic study in philosophical law in 1932 at the Roman Catholic University of Nijmegen where he was particularly interested in the task and limits of the state—which brought him into contact with Dooyeweerd's "philosophy of the law-idea." He defended his dissertation for the Ph.D., a critical analysis of the humanistic theory of the law-state, under Dooyeweerd's supervision at the Free University in Amsterdam in 1940. From 1945 to 1975, Mekkes worked for the Dutch equivalent of the F.B.I. He published his last article (one of almost 600) in 1975.

Mekkes's lectures were often difficult to grasp, but nonetheless well-attended. His four books, this one included, require focused attention, but clearly evidence reformational insight and the voice of conviction in ceaseless service to "the Master": "'Truly, I am not ashamed of the Gospel, for it is the power of God unto salvation.' That means the salvation of creation in all its revelational splendor, including science and theory. When its idols are done away with, in the purifying world-fire, creation, reborn by this power, will lay down its sacrifice in the Civitas Dei."